by Chris Fox
Crewes wore his armor, currently a deep purple, and Aran didn’t really blame him. In fact, he considered heading down to the cargo hold and equipping his own.
Not necessary, Narlifex buzzed. I remember fire god. Fire god awakened me. There is no danger here, only allies.
He knew intellectually the blade was right, but the feeling persisted. I’ll never be comfortable approaching a god that could accidentally kill me with a casual step.
“Officer on deck,” Rhea barked as she spun the chair in her command matrix to face him. She snapped a tight salute, one Crewes and Bord immediately echoed.
“Morning, Rhea. You’re relieved.” Aran moved to stand outside her matrix as she exited. He almost took an instinctive step inside, which had become habit. The fact that he didn’t need to was going to take some getting used to. “Will you head down to the cargo hold, and get the squad ready for deployment? Sergeant, Specialist, please go with her.”
Crewes gave Aran a respectful nod as he exited the bridge, while all Bord offered was a weak smile as he followed. Aran’s shoulders slumped. It felt like there was a distance that hadn’t been there before.
Aran reached for his link to the ship in the same way he did when communicating with Narlifex. “Bring us home, boy. You can set down right where you picked us up.”
Something pulsed through the ship, a quick magical shine infused the walls, then was gone. An answer? Perhaps the only one the ship was capable of giving. The view on the scry-screen didn’t change, still unbroken blackness, but the position indicator in the lower corner began to scroll as they picked up speed.
A moment later they broke through the illusion cloaking Neith’s world, and Aran perceived her planet through the Talon’s senses. It was unchanged, a mostly barren rock with a bit of water, and a whole lot of mountainous caves where countless arachnidrake hatchlings lived.
The Talon approached the planet at an angle, its shadowed grey mass growing larger as they approached. Aran turned and left the bridge, threading his way down to the cargo hold. He’d intentionally waited, and not just because of the fear.
More and more Aran was realizing that as the commanding officer he couldn’t fraternize like he once could. Much as he wanted to pretend otherwise, barriers were growing. Bord and Kez and Crewes were still the same soldiers, but he’d gone from a raw wipe to a captain, though if he was being honest his responsibilities warranted a rank more like major, or maybe even commander.
He let the distractions fall away as he entered the cargo hold, and pride swelled when he saw his people ready for battle. Rhea hovered in her Mark XI spellarmor, which had been painted a deep blue with gold highlights. It reminded him of the Confederacy, and he rather liked it.
Crewes, Bord, and Kezia all stood in a line, each in their armor, and each cradling their respective weapons. Bord and Kez had their faceplates down, so he couldn’t judge their mood.
“All right, people,” he began. “We’re going to be landing in just under sixty seconds. Once we touch down, we’re going to move through the hangar in cover formation. Rhea, I want you to advance until we reach the giant double doors at the far side. Hopefully we’ll run into a caretaker, one of Neith’s people, and they’ll guide us. Don’t cast unless cast upon.”
“You said her name,” Crewes said, blinking.
“I think her prohibition doesn’t work here.” Aran offered a shrug, then moved to his spellarmor. He sketched a void sigil, and slid inside. The comfortable tang of old sweat surrounded him as the foam tightened around his body, and the HUD flared to life.
A moment later there was an audible thunk as the Talon set down.
“Let’s move, Outriders,” Rhea ordered, as she snapped her faceplate down and glided toward the Talon’s shimmering, blue field. It winked out of existence at her approach, exposing both the golden ramp and cavernous hangar they’d landed in.
Aran had the freedom to examine his surroundings as he trailed after the squad. Not having to run the combat op was kind of nice, and he really studied the immense pillars they passed as they threaded toward the doors leading to Neith.
There was no movement, and no sound. This place could have been a tomb, and for a single instant Aran worried that some dark god had found this place and killed off Neith.
Then he sensed the ocean of fire in the distance. It was a vast reservoir of immense strength, and now that Aran had met several gods he could properly categorize Neith. She was much, much stronger than Voria, but considerably weaker than Krox.
Something skittered in the darkness ahead, and the light of the globe of fire hanging over Crewes’s head glinted off multi-faceted eyes. Eight eyes.
“You are expected,” a voice like rustling cloth came from the shadows, “The one called Aran may approach. The rest of you must return to your ship, immediately.” There was a touch of urgency to the command, which seemed out of keeping. The caretakers he’d met previously were almost servile, and expressed no emotions.
“Captain?” Rhea pivoted her armor in the air to face him. “Shall I escort the company back to the Talon?”
“Affirmative.” Aran rose up into the air near her, and willed a bit of flame to illuminate the skin of his armor. The light brightened gradually, exposing the caretaker’s many-limbed body. Nara had hated these things, but for Aran they merely made him uncomfortable, though he wasn’t sure why. “Keep the Talon ready to move. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but I expect not long. Remember, people, we’re guests here.”
Rhea began herding the company back the way they’d come, leaving Aran in the custody of the caretaker. The creature’s jaws quivered as it spoke. “If you’ll come with me, Captain, Neith awaits.”
7
Actionable Intel
Aran followed the caretaker as it shuffled deeper into the hangar, though that term didn’t seem entirely accurate. They housed ships here, and a number of berths were scattered seemingly at random, but the bulk of every area contained shelves lined with knowledge scales. They glowed with their own inner light, like a sea of orderly fireflies, lining his path toward the titanic double doors sealing Neith’s chamber.
He snapped his faceplate down, and drifted toward the doors. As expected, the doors swung silently open. As they did so, the caretaker turned wordlessly and scuttled back the direction it had come, no doubt returning to whatever errand it had been about.
Aran flew between the golden doors, which began to close behind him. A wide stairway descended down into darkness, and he knew it ended in a room large enough to house a goddess of Neith’s considerable size.
The last time he hadn’t been able to see her until she’d lit a flame, and the illumination from his armor wasn’t nearly enough to banish the shadows. But he knew exactly where she was standing. A mountain-sized shape lounged against one wall, her bulk blazing to Aran’s supernatural senses. She contained so much fire, perhaps as much as Krox had.
“You have changed much, little vessel,” Neith’s voice broke over Aran like thunder, and it actually knocked him back a step in midair. If not for the armor his ears would have bled, like last time. “I can feel Xal’s touch upon you. He has claimed you, and invested a not inconsiderable amount of his power to do so. Tell me, Outrider, do you understand what being a Hound of Xal signifies?”
She is my Mother. Narlifex pulsed. In the same way Xal is my father.
Aran supposed the blade was right, in a way. Maybe that made Virkonna its aunt. He drifted closer to Neith, and willed a sliver of fire to amplify his voice. “I’m beginning to, and I don’t much like it. In fact, that’s why I’ve come. For answers. Hounds exist to find and devour magic, don’t they?”
“That is their primary function,” Neith allowed. The titanic goddess scooted forward, the ground trembling as she moved. “But it does not answer the question. Being a Hound of Xal means that you are designed to hunt Xal’s enemies, to slay them, and upon your death to return all the magical energies you have collected to your master, like a bee
to the hive.”
“How does that work if that master is dead?” Aran wondered aloud. He drifted closer, moving higher until he was roughly at eye level with the world’s largest arachnidrake. Curiously, he experienced none of the fear or reverence that he had the last time he’d been here. Of course, he’d seen a lot since then.
“How do you define death?” Neith mused, her jaws quivering. She gestured, and a vast illusion covered the upper portion of the room. Stars and planets spun out all around them, then the illusion zoomed in on a remote sector, one with a fading red dwarf in the last phase of the sun’s existence.
A headless corpse floated in the void, and at first Aran thought it might be a Wyrm. It had wings, arms, and legs, like a hatchling. But it wasn’t a hatchling. The body looked a good deal more like the demon queen Malila’s had, back at the Skull of Xal. It was a demon, not a dragon. And the sheer size of the thing against the backdrop of the sun made something chillingly clear to Aran.
This body was large enough to be attached to the Skull of Xal.
“What am I looking at?” Aran asked as he gazed up at the illusion.
“It is called the Husk of Xal,” she explained, and raised a scaled appendage to gesture. “You saw Xal’s death. This is what remains of his body. The magic has been stripped away, and the head moved thirty light years from the body. Yet is Xal truly dead? I often wonder. Xal allowed himself to be killed. He neither resisted, nor attempted to flee. Why? Why allow himself to be consumed, unless he had some sort of plan?”
It was a good question. What had Xal seen that caused him to choose the course he had? Aran thought back to the first time he’d touched the god’s mind. Xal had gone calmly to his death, and had seemed certain that it was a necessary part of whatever victory he ultimately sought.
“Do you have any theories?” Aran rose a bit higher, and turned his attention from the illusion back to the goddess.
“I do, but they are immaterial to your current need,” Neith countered. She waved a clawed appendage and the illusion disappeared. “You have come seeking ‘actionable intel’, have you not?”
“Effectively,” Aran admitted. “We need to understand our enemies, and that’s proving difficult. There’s no hard data about either Krox or Nefarius, and I don’t know who to concentrate on or what the real threat is. Krox attacked Shaya, and now has Worldender. That makes him the primary threat in my book, and I’m sure whatever he’s planning it isn’t good. But we know Talifax is scheming to bring Nefarius back, and I’ve seen enough to realize how bad that will be. So what do I do? Where do I focus? I can only be in one place at a time, and I feel like whichever choice I make will leave us screwed in the end.”
“Neither is the true question you wish to ask, which is whether or not you will become evil now that you are a hound. I do not have the answer for that, because evil isn’t so easily defined. It will certainly change you, but how remains to be seen.” Neith settled onto her haunches, somehow managing to look like a typical house cat. “I can, however, shed a great deal of light on your dilemma with Krox and Nefarius. Krox is the lesser threat for the time being. It is true that he possesses Worldender, but the addition of Nebiat as a factor has dramatically altered Krox’s motives. She has used immense magic to breathe life into her world.”
The goddess gestured again, and this time the illusion showed the Erkadi Rift, their perspective zooming inside the purple nebula, whizzing past stars and planets and dust clouds. It finally slowed, and stopped at an unfamiliar green-blue world.
Aran was somehow able to perceive the entire world at once, and saw hundreds of thousands of hatchlings scattered across a half-dozen continents. They lived in small flights, and more than one group had begun warring on their neighbors.
“None of this existed a cycle ago,” Neith explained. “Nebiat has re-created her species, and in the process undone Krox’s plans. She wishes to see her people rise and conquer, which is very different than devouring every living being, as Nefarius seeks. It will take Nebiat many years to develop her power, and while she will be a threat, we will always have the advantage of knowing what she values.”
Aran considered that. Nebiat wanting to preserve her people made sense, and if she really did control Krox it meant that she’d force him to look out for her interests. Those almost certainly ran counter to their own, but at least he understood her motivation.
“What does Nefarius want?” Aran found himself asking. “And better yet, what does Talifax get out of it? You’ve implied they’re the greater threat. How?”
Neith rose again, and began doing something very un-godlike. She paced back and forth across the chamber, swaying as she shuffled. “I have dedicated a dozen millennia in contemplation of that question.” She closed her many-faceted eyes and spoke again. “Nefarius is a Wyrm, and one of my siblings. Our mother was known as the Wyrm Mother. Not a Wyrm Mother, but the Wyrm Mother. The progenitor of our entire race. As ancient as I am…she remembered a time before what Ternus scientists would call the Big Bang.”
The illusion shifted as she spoke, and Aran focused his attention on it. The sky went fully dark, like the umbral depths. Then sudden light flared, and light, matter, and heat exploded outward from a single point.
It spun through the cosmos, flung in all directions. Magic and mundane matter and energy in every form, all scattered across the cosmos.
“My mother,” Neith continued, “was one of the original elder gods. She was created by the titans, who in turn were created by a being we call Om.”
“Om?” Aran asked.
Neith waved an appendage, and the illusion shifted. Now it showed a terrestrial world, a temple carved directly into a mountainside, peopled by dozens of monks in orange robes. Those monks knelt in even lines, and as one they sucked in a breath and began to chant.
A single sound issued from every throat, forming a layered, wordless sound, “Ohhhhmmmmmmmmmmm.” On and on it went, then ceased and began again, arising and ceasing like the song of the universe.
“Do you see?” Neith asked. “They do not understand, but what they are doing is venerating the creator of us all. The sound they make is the name of god, or goddess perhaps. Such things may be irrelevant to such a deity. A deity that may no longer exist.”
That was a lot to take in. Aran added the new information to his hierarchy of the universe. Lesser gods, like Voria, then elder gods, like Krox or Neith, or this Wyrm Mother, and then something above them called a titan. All created by a single being from the sound of it.
“What happened to your mother?” Aran clasped his hands behind his back, and tried to be as respectful as possible. He might not fear Neith in the same way, but if anything his veneration had grown.
“Over the eons she created many Wyrms.” The vision shifted again, now showing an unfamiliar world where two massive Wyrms battled. “She created dozens of species, from lowly wyverns to unintelligent drakes, to my own unique species. The more modern Wyrm that now dominates the sector came from a relatively recent experiment. Our people have always formed dragon flights, and for countless millennia they policed much of this galaxy. Every Wyrm among them prayed to be elevated, and in her lifetime my mother granted that request precisely eight times. Each of her divine offspring, myself included, were gifted with mastery over one aspect of the Circle of Eight. I embody fire, as you know. Nefarius embodied void. She was a fierce warrior, rivaled only by our younger sister, Virkonna.”
Neith hunched down, and sadness wafted off of her in divine waves. The magic overpowered Aran, and he felt her grief become his own. Tears streamed down his face as the illusion shifted and showed a dragon with black scales dismembering an eight-headed dragon with iridescent scales that shifted in color as she fell through the skies of some distant world.
The midnight dragon tore out her throats, and began feasting on her corpse.
“My mother bore many gifts,” Neith explained, her grief total, “but she did not possess the same foresight I do. She was unabl
e to predict her fate, to see the growing darkness in Nefarius. For a hundred millennia Nefarius had been a champion. A protector. I do not know what changed her, but it happened after Talifax was named guardian. Is he a symptom or the cause? We cannot know.”
Aran cocked his head, and wondered if there was anything actionable he could take back. “How strong is Nefarius relative to you or Krox? What kind of force will it take to bring her down if she comes back? I mean, I’d prefer we never let her come back at all, but you seem unsure how to prevent it.”
“Indeed.” Neith’s jaws quivered in a disturbing way that might have been anger. “Talifax has carefully cloaked my sister’s return. I do not know how he will achieve it, only that he will. When she returns she will be weaker than she was, but every god in the sector is weaker. Nor will she remain weak. Nefarius will begin a campaign of conquest and destruction, and she will devour every Catalyst and god she can find until she has consumed all magic in this sector. Once it is drained she will do the same to every other sector, and presumably every galaxy if not stopped. I do not know her ultimate goal, but I do know that our extinction is merely a step on her path.”
“And how do you suggest I stop her?” Aran asked. Neith’s logic was inescapable, and it did appear Nefarius was the greater threat. The fact that her guardian was making Nara’s life hell added a little weight to that need. He didn’t like the idea that this guy could materialize inside his quarters at will.
“You gather allies,” Neith suggested. “Beginning with my sister. Virkonna is powerful. Perhaps the most powerful goddess living. Wake her, and you may have a chance to stop Nefarius before her rebirth.”
Aran exhaled a heavy sigh. Why did doing what he needed to do always come at a personal cost? He’d felt supremely uncomfortable on Virkon, especially around his sister Astria. Going back was pretty much the last thing he wanted to do. Olyssa had turned Rhea away when she’d needed help the most, and it didn’t exactly endear her to him.
